OT: Do people still use DOS based BBS's, What about ALT.newsgroup or whatever Options

[Mueller]

Never really understood what the heck these things are compared to the internet I know with webpages and all that fancy graphics

where the BBSs and alt.newsgroups or alt.whatever the only way to communicate before html or windoz or ???

tried to look it up, but just got confused (IMG:http://www.914world.com/bbs2/html/emoticons/wacko.gif)

[lapuwali]

In the beginning, there were many unconnected "nets", each with their own email standards, and some with chat like features, and some even browsing features (PLATO, at the U of I, allowed looking up restaurants, movie listings, etc. from dedicated touch-screen terminals as early as 1980). The "Internet" was the bridge between those nets, and created a new communal email standard. Lists of people insterested in a single topic formed as mailing lists, and dedicated management software appeared to handle this. Newsgroups followed with B News, later supplanted by C News, which allowed many anonymous readers and non-anonymous writers. None of this stuff was "DOS based", but based primarily on Un*x systems on lots of different hardware. There were many other "browsing-like" technologies like archie, for a time. In the PC world, dial-up BBSes existed, and even nets of them were formed (FidoNet, for example). Compuserve came into being on top of a time-sharing system called Tymnet to become a mega BBS.

In 1987 or thereabouts, thin links formed between The Internet, previously only connecting universities, military sites, and research centers together, and the dial-up BBSes. Compuserve resisted, then finally relented in 1990 or so. AOL appeared to compete with Compuserve.

By 1992, the Internet was clearly becoming the leader, and Compuserve, AOL, and other BBSes were becoming mere portals into the vast Internet. Also around this time, the WWW software began to emerge from CERN and the University of Illinois, where it had lived in obsurity for some time.